Blog

One thing I’ve realised after experiencing the world of words myself is that, in order to be a writer, you have to be a hundred other things. You have to be every person in this world, and sometimes beyond this world. 

You have to be a doctor, or how would you know how to treat that specific shoulder wound your character inflicted on themselves while ice skating. You have to be, then, an ice skater too, or how would you know how your character got hurt in the first place. 

You have to be a detective , to investigate that murder mystery that has your readers on the edge of their seats. You have to be a murderer too—or atleast, you have to have the mind of a murderer—to make the mystery begin in the first place. You have to know how long a human can live without food, without water, without food but with water. You have to know how much blood a human can lose before fainting and how long thay have in case they’ve been bitten by a snake. And this is just if you’re writing realistic fiction.

If you’re working on fantasy, or science fiction, or paranormal, you have to know even more interesting things like the life span of Vampires, or the number of limbs a Wyvern has, or the average size of a dragon, or how long it takes to kill someone’s using Hemlock (it’s a poison). 

While you’re writing, you have to be shy, clever, kind, sometimes a psychopath, sometimes anxious, antisocial, extrovert…

You have to know. You have to know so much it’s almost exhilarating. It’s thrilling, how much knowledge is before you and how you can consume it and create something out of it. 

In the beginning, you might not think that you need any sort of factual knowledge when you start writing, but soon enough you’ll realise otherwise as you find yourself in the middle of your book and sifting through twenty tabs on stuff like how many hours a person can go without sleep before they start having hallucinations or how do serpents digest their food. 

And then suddenly, you’re not reading about snakes or sleep anymore, but something completely different, like the origin of tooth fairies in folklore. You start reading about silkworms, you end up watching a video on knitting soft scarves for your cat. I’ve done it before. I do it all the time.

One obvious reason for this might be a lack of span of attention. Another bigger reason for these distractions is the absolute enormity and diversity of the amount of information available online on any given topic. There’s new information, old information, accurate information, and information that’s complete nonsense. There’s information you need, information you don’t need, and information you might just need in the future, being the writer you are. It’s an ocean of knowledge and you want that particular drop. Sifting through this information can be really bad for the health of your book, so it’s better if you might as well just have it 

In this series I will try to gather all the relevant and reliable information that a writer might need as they venture forth on the path of creating stories. The foundation of fiction, after all, has to be fact. So, dive head first into the ocean of Fiction, but don’t forget to take the life jacket of Fact with you.

Genres of Literature

A genre means a category or type of any form of art. The thing about categories is that there are always more categories than you think there are. I’ve always considered the whole concept of categories and boxes as rather pointless to be honest, since no two things really can fit perfectly into one box or category. But it is an organisational trick and it does prevent us from making a mess of things most of the time. 

Being this, in literature, it usually refers to the whole foundation that a written work is based around—its setting, tone, characters and so on. It gives any form of writing a structure, a semblance of a foundation that you can build upon and explore. It can be restricting or helpful, depending on how you treat it, but it does give you something to work with and create it into something unique and new. 
A story has no rules, but it does have a semi solid shape that you can mould it into. The story is based on the shape, and then when the time comes, the shape also changes to align itself around the story.

Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form. Story is about eternal, universal forms, not formulas.

Robert McKee, Story

Some of the most familiar genres are Fantasy, Tragedy, Romance, Horror, Science Fiction, Crime, Thriller and so on. Most of the time, in fact almost all of the time, these genres overlap. They blend in with and complement each other.

“Each genre is a colour slide, complete in itself, possessing its own satisfying composition, but also working in concert with the others to create a single literary experience”

Dr. Tom Romano

Most of the time, classifying them can be a bit tricky. No two writers and no two readers would agree on the exact number of genres and the exact form of these genres.
As for me, the broadest classification of literary genres begins with Nonfiction and Fiction. 

Nonfiction

Nonfiction as a genre encompasses all forms of written works that are factual rather than fictional. It may be Historical, Biographical, Self help, Religious, Philosophical, and so many more. It may be the Lifestyle blogs we read and the Cookbooks we’ve stored up somewhere, and the Moral debates we read and the Speeches and the Autobiographies. They all need some concrete facts and information that they are based upon. 

But what about the Facts in Fiction? 

Fiction

“Yet fiction remains the backbone of the creative writing industry.”

Today, when there are millions of readers and writers and more books of fiction than one person could ever hope to even know about, one must acknowledge the power of fiction in our lives. It is more than just a genre of creative writing, it is one of the ecosystems that literary writing thrives in. Like an ecosystem, it grows and evolves and expands, both outwards and inwards. Like an ecosystem, it has rules, and like an ecosystem, it breaks those rules. It is flexible and ever changing. 

“What the beginning writer ordinarily wants is a set of rules on what to and not to do in fiction. . . . but on the whole the search for aesthetic absolutes is a misapplication of the writer’s energy. When one begins to be persuaded that certain things must never be done in fiction, and certain other things must always be done, one has entered the first stage of aesthetic arthritis, the disease that ends up in pedantic rigidity and the atrophy of intuition”

The Art of Fiction, John Gardener

The first thing we need to realise as we start the journey of writing fiction is that we only have the foundation in the form of genres and tropes and character archetypes. What we don’t have is a map, or a set of instructions about how to go on and how not to go on. There are no Do’s and Don’ts, and in my opinion, that’s what makes this even more interesting.

There is always scope to explore, to create and to reach unknown heights. There is always something new to find and show the world